Frank van Harmelen is a full professor in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

His current main research area is the Semantic Web. He was one of the designers of OWL, the W3C standard Web Ontology Language, and was scientific director of LarKC, the Large Knowledge Collider, an effort to build an infrastructure for reasoning with web-scale datasets (see http://www.larkc.eu for more information). He has published over 100 papers, many of them in leading journals and conferences and many of them widely cited (Hirsch index h=41, among the 1000 most cited Computer Science scholars world wide).

One of his five books is the first text book on Semantic Web technology, now deployed in university courses across the world, with translations in Japanese, Chinese and Korean. His interests focus on the development of methods that combine the formal strength of logic while still being able to cope with approximation, incompleteness and good-enough computation. Besides his scientific interest, he is scientific advisor of Aduna, one of the earliest companies in the Semantic Web arena, and developers of the Sesame RDF storage and retrieval engine.